"You Wouldn't Steal a Car" was an anti-piracy campaign of the early 2000s, famously ineffectual and the target of many parodies. It has long been known the campaign exceeded the licensing terms of the music it used—pirated, you might say—and now analysis of the font shows it to be a replica of a commercial typeface designed by Just van Rossum—pirated, you might say. Rib found the campaign's original PDF file on the Internet Archive, and the embedded font filenames snitched on it.
the font had been cloned and released illegally for free under the name "XBAND Rough". Naturally, it would be hilarious if the anti-piracy campaign actually turned out to have used this pirated font, so I went sleuthing and quickly found a PDF from the campaign site with the font embedded (https://web.archive.org/web/20051223202935/http://www.piracyisacrime.com:80/press/pdfs/150605_8PP_brochure.pdf). So I chucked it into FontForge and yep, turns out the campaign used a pirated font the entire time!
Font licensing is a mess, and a dirty mess at that. But if there's one work by one author that needed to get it right, it was surely this one.
Previously:
• The Type Deck: playing cards with beautiful fonts
• Game Font Library is a library of game fonts
• Adobe ends support for Type 1 fonts
• Fantastic collection of pixel fonts inspired by classic games
• Retro game fonts
